Overview

From one of the major innovators of New Journalism, Norman Mailer's The Fight is the real-life story of a clash between two of the world's greatest boxers, both in and out of the ring Norman Mailer's The Fight focuses on the 1974 World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in Kinshasa, Zaire. Muhammad Ali met George Foreman in the ring. Foreman's genius employed silence, serenity and cunning. He had never been defeated. His hands were his instrument, and 'he kept them in his pockets the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case'. Together the two men made boxing history in an explosive meeting of two great minds, two iron wills and monumental egos.

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9780141184142

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Entertaining... Mailer continues his familiar shadow-boxing with the ineffable. -- Time In 1975 in Kinshasa, Zaire, at the virtual center of Africa, two African American boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to fight each other until one was declared winner. One was Muhammad Ali, the aging but irrepressible professor of boxing who vowed to reclaim the championship he had lost. The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble and who kept his hands in his pockets the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case. Observing them was Norman Mailer, whose grasp of the titanic battle's feints and stratagems -- and whose sensitivity to their deeper symbolism -- make this book a masterpiece of the literature of sport. Whether he is analyzing the fighters' moves, interpreting their characters, or weighing their competing claims on the African and American souls, Mailer is a commentator of unparalleled energy, acumen, and audacity -- and su

Norman Mailer, rechristened No'min, takes on the heart of Blackness in darkest Africa as he plunges into the vital spirits of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in their recent Heavyweight title clash in Zaire (once the huge protectorate of the Congo), and comes up a winner. What No'min wins may not be definable outside an Occult Prose seminar, but it has something to do with Bantu mysticism as exemplified in Ali the Lip's supreme professorship of the art of pugilism and Foreman's gigantic serenity of lionesque rage. Truly, No'min's hypnoprose works wonders at engaging our interest and transubstantiating it into an awe commensurate with the bash's press coverage, a five-million-dollar gate, and worldwide TV attention. Indeed, the book at its weird best has something of the inner control of Conrad steaming upriver through fogs of Black emotion, Black psychology and Black love - though all is admittedly a quintessentially comic quest. Boxers were liars. Champions were great liars. Nor is that great boxing expert in the Beyond and author of Green Hills of 33 Africa ever far from No'min's bag of conjuries. By fight time the reader has been artfully hoodooed into expecting more from the match than anyone but Mailer saw in it - and amazingly delivers. Mailer's mask as narcissistic clown is cut down to a caper or two; instead he divides our hearts between Ali and Foreman. Surely Papa is at last sending down his personal vibration to No'min: Well and truly done, my son. Go in peace to the bar. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was one of the great post-War American writers, both as a novelist and as one of the key inventors of the New Journalism. His books include the novels The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park, Why Are We in Vietnam?, The Executioner's Song and Harlot's Ghost and the non-fiction works The Armies of the Night, A Fire on the Moon (published in the USA as Of a Fire on the Moon) and The Fight. He won the National Book Award and twice won the Pulitzer Prize.

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